Jack gazed at her in wonderment:
“Yes—of course he did and—Why, Miss Ruth!—Why, what's the matter! Have I said anything that—”
“Then something serious has happened,” she interrupted in a decided tone. “That is always his message to me when he is in trouble. That is what he telegraphed me when he lost the coffer-dam in the Susquehanna. Oh!—he did not really tell you that, did he, Mr. Breen?” The old anxious note had returned—the one he had heard at the “fill.”
“Yes—but nothing serious HAS happened, Miss Ruth,” Jack persisted, his voice rising in the intensity of his conviction, his earnest, truthful eyes fixed on hers—“nothing that will not come out all right in the end. Please, don't be worried, I know what I am talking about.”
“Oh, yes, it is serious,” she rejoined with equal positiveness. “You do not know daddy. Nothing ever discourages him, and he meets everything with a smile—but he cannot stand any more losses. The explosion was bad enough, but if this 'fill' is to be rebuilt, I don't know what will be the end of it. Tell me over again, please—how did he look when he said it?—and give me just the very words. Oh, dear, dear daddy! What will he do?” The anxious note had now fallen to one of the deepest suffering.
Jack repeated the message word for word, all his tenderness in his tones—patting her shoulder in his effort to comfort her—ending with a minute explanation of what Garry had told him: but Ruth would not be convinced.
“But you don't know daddy,” she kept repeating “You don't know him. Nobody does but me. He would not have sent that message had he not meant it. Listen! There he is now!” she cried, springing to her feet.
She had her arms around her father's neck, her head nestling on his shoulder before he had fairly entered the door. “Daddy, dear, is it very bad?” she murmured.
“Pretty bad, little girl,” he answered, smoothing her cheek tenderly with his chilled fingers as he moved with her toward the fire, “but it might have been worse but for the way Breen handled the men.”
“And will it all have to be rebuilt?”